FLAX Training Videos

Training videos for the FLAX Language project in collaboration with TOETOE: Enter the FLAX language project collections to see how research corpora managed by the University of Oxford IT Services (the British National Corpus and the British Academic Written English corpus) have been prised open and how Oxford open educational resources have been re-purposed for uses in English language learning and teaching. Many other powerful open tools and resources feature in these collections based on Greenstone’s award-winning open source digital library software, including open content from Wikimedia and linguistic data from Google.

FLAX Learning Collocations Search: Enter this collection to search for the company words keep. How words form into collocational patterns in native-speaker writing and speaking will be revealed by looking across the 100 million-word BNC reference corpus, the BAWE corpus of 2500 university student writing texts and the Wikipedia crowd-sourced corpus of 200 million articles. FLAX provides a powerful automated open source software interface for searching deep into the corpora and links to further useful resources, including the live Web and Roget’s thesaurus.

FLAX Learning Collocations Save: Enter this collection to save collocations selections you have made while searching across the 100 million-word BNC reference corpus, the BAWE corpus of 2500 university student writing texts and the Wikipedia crowd-sourced corpus of 200 million articles. FLAX provides a powerful automated open source software interface for searching, retrieving and saving collocations from across the corpora using the Cherry Picking function where collocations can be stored for re-use and printed or saved as export files from your Cherry Basket in FLAX.

FLAX Learning Collocations Play: Enter this collection to play with automated collocations activities based on the British National Corpus (BNC). How words form into collocating patterns in native-speaker writing and speaking will be revealed by looking at the 100 million-word BNC reference corpus, the BAWE corpus of 2500 university student writing texts and the Wikipedia crowd-sourced corpus of 200 million articles. FLAX provides a powerful automated open source software interface for searching, saving and playing with collocations for advancing your English proficiency in writing and speaking.

FLAX Web Collections (derived from Google linguistic data): The Web Phrases and Web Collocations collections in FLAX are based on another extensive corpus of English derived from Google linguistic data. In particular, the Web Phrases collection allows you to identify problematic phrasing in writing by fine-tuning words that precede and follow phrases that you would like to use in your writing by drawing on this large database of English from Google. This allows you to substitute any awkward phrasing with naturally occurring phrases from the collection to improve the structure and the fluency of writing.

FLAX British Academic Written English (BAWE) Collections: Interact with the BAWE corpus of university student writing from across the disciplines and learn about the 13 different genres assigned by the makers of the corpus (Nesi, Gardner, Thompson & Wickens, 2007). Try out features from the FLAX open source software project for understanding the BAWE, including: word lists and keyness indicators; collocations; lexical bundles; a glossary function with Wikipedia; along with searching, saving and linking functions for exploring the BAWE corpus.

FLAX Do-It-Yourself Podcast Corpora – Part One: Learn how to build powerful open language collections through this training video demonstration. Featuring audio and video podcast corpora using the FLAX Language tools and open educational resources (OER) from the OpenSpires project at the University of Oxford and TED Talks.

FLAX Do-It-Yourself Podcast Corpora – Part Two: Continue to learn how to make powerful open language collections and how to build interactivity into those collections with a wide variety of automated interactive language learning tasks through this demonstration training video. Featuring audio and video podcast corpora, using the FLAX Language tools and open educational resources (OER) from the OpenSpires project at the University of Oxford and TED Talks.